The demand for systems that monitor homes and businesses for alarm conditions has continued to grow as more home and business owners seek to protect their premises from various hazards and threats. Examples include intrusion, fire, carbon monoxide and flooding, among others dangers that may be monitored and reported to a monitoring station. When a sensor such as a motion detector is triggered, a representative at a remote monitoring center receives an alarm event code and initiates a response process, including contacting a homeowner or others on a contact list and/or first responders such as local firefighters and/or police to request a dispatch to investigate the event at the premises being monitored.
While these systems provide numerous benefits, there are limitations on the ability of a home or business owner to prevent the initiation of response services when not needed, e.g., in the case of a “false alarm.” For example, when an alarm event is triggered, there is typically a short period of time allotted to enter a disarm code into the system (either directly into the system at the premises or via remotely such as via mobile application), which then sends an indication that it has been disarmed back to monitoring center. This disarm event is also an indicator that responder dispatch may not be needed. When an alarm event is first received, a representative from the monitoring center also calls a contact number for property owner to verify whether or not to request response services.
However, if the representative cannot immediately speak with the home or business owner, the representative may not be able to adequately verify the nature of the alarm event within a short window of time, and a request for response services may be initiated to investigate. Similarly, while the user may learn of an alarm event via a system notification, if they are not able to quickly disarm the system at the premises (prompting it to send a “disarm” event that is received by the monitoring center) and/or call the monitoring center representative, response services will have already been initiated by the time the owner disarms the system or verifies to the monitoring center representative, and it may not be possible to prevent emergency response.
These limitations on the ability to prevent an emergency response can result in wasted resources at the monitoring center, unnecessary use of valuable response resources, as well as undue cost to the system owner in fees to the responding municipalities or even fines for a false alarm response.